Albert Lea Journal Features, Events, Opinion and Reviews

I think the irony of the kind of individualism expressed in this quote is that it allows more individuals to be trampled. When an individual fails, to some extent it’s also usually a family failure, a community failure, and a societal failure. In this way of thinking, though, the individual is the only one that is held accountable. Everyone else is absolved.

Don’t get me wrong, individuals need to be held accountable for their actions, but society has a responsibility to help give them better opportunities in the first place. It’s neither public-spirited nor Christian to tell a kid from tough circumstances, “You’re on your own. Whatever you do, it’s on you, not us.”

Reagan had a special way of delivering these messages with a friendly wink. When anybody else says it, it just sounds mean-spirited. No wonder conservatives miss him so much.

Families grieve for loved ones trapped under rubble near Dhaka, Bangladesh (Photo Credit: Reuters)

In the latest clothing factory disaster in Bangladesh, over 360 are confirmed dead and hundreds are still missing in a collapsed building. Over 350 died in factory fires last fall in Bangladesh and Pakistan.

Problems like poor working conditions, low wages, and lax oversight are usually invisible to us, but we drive the demand. Women’s clothing barely costs more now than it did in 1980, largely due to the collapse of the US clothing industry and the rise of overseas sweatshops. Please be conscious of where your clothes were made, and be willing to buy fewer items at higher prices when you know the clothes were made in better conditions.

I’ve bought several items from American Apparel, but I haven’t been crazy about their fit. Mainly I just buy “second market” to avoid supporting any sweatshops directly, but I’m still benefiting from the glut of cheap clothing purchased and then quickly pared from people’s closets.

The invisible poor. (Image source: Photobucket)

I’ve read about all I can on the stomach-churning Gosnell case for now.

It’s confounding how Gosnell operated for so long–the clinic should have been shut down a long time ago for alleged illegal procedures (abortions after 24 weeks being one of a long list). From what I’ve read, his clients were mainly poor, underserved, desperate women. One of the worst insults to justice is that he didn’t even get thoroughly investigated after a woman (who was both a mother and a grandmother) died. He got caught because of a “pill mill” sting.

The news value of the story is obvious, but I think the reason this didn’t get picked up earlier is that his clientele is mainly invisible. I don’t know if it’s a liberal bias like some people claim–this could just as easily make conservative media uneasy because he was practically operating as an illegal abortionist, the way it almost all was done before Roe vs. Wade.

Abortions are not primarily about lack of morals, they’re about economics. We have to change the economics–access to contraception, education, jobs, child care, health care, affordable housing, etc.–to reduce abortions. Criminalization would put a lot of people like Gosnell in business without necessarily reducing abortions. (This is often the case in countries where abortions are illegal. Some of these countries have much higher abortion rates than the US, and many women die or suffer life-threatening infections.) The money would draw them, and their clients wouldn’t rat them out, just like Gosnell’s didn’t. That’s how it was before Roe in the US–a lot of illegal abortionists preyed upon desperate women.

The book “The Worst of Times” by Patricia Miller is an eye-opening, gut-wrenching primer on what it was like for women seeking to end pregnancies before 1973. I recommend it, even though it is emotionally tough to read. I wanted to stop reading it at several points, but I felt like I had to listen to the women and men who were bearing witness to those times.

I’m glad this case is finally getting attention. That kind of horror should never happen. We can’t let these women be invisible, and we can’t go back to the way things were.

I’ve been struck by a number of instances lately of rank insensitivity to blacks and black voters on the part of conservatives and Republicans, so I pulled together a number of them below:

1. Three Hours to Vote

Two weeks ago on Fox News, Brian Kilmeade, Bill Hemmer, and Martha MacCallum used up air time questioning what the big deal is that 102-year-old Desaline Victor, a black woman, had to wait 3 hours in line to vote last fall.

Can we go ahead and agree that nobody in an industrialized, high-tech democracy like the United States should have to wait in line three hours to vote? I had to take my two young children to the poll with me, and we got in and out of there in about 10 minutes. If I had had to wait for three hours, it would have been extremely difficult for me to vote. Standing in line for just an extra half hour would have been tough. I sympathize with anybody who had to wait a long time.

For some of Fox News’ broadcasters to laugh about this woman’s ordeal is really beyond the pale. It’s dismissive of black people (and Hispanics) who are much more likely to have to wait in long lines to vote, and it’s also disrespectful toward older Americans. They should pull their heads out of the conservative echo chamber and get some fresh air to their brains.

2. Electoral College Deform

In the Virginia statehouse, a Republican senator proposed electoral college reform that would apportion Virginia’s electoral votes based on voting results within congressional districts.

The proposed plan, if it had been in place in 2012, would have given Mitt Romney more electoral votes in Virginia, even though Obama received a majority of the state’s popular vote. The justification for the plan goes something like this: State Senator Charles Carrico of Grayson County “wants to give smaller communities a bigger voice. ‘The last election, constituents were concerned that it didn’t matter what they did, that more densely populated areas were going to outvote them,’ he said.”

Well, yes, Virginia’s rural Republican votes meant nothing in the Electoral College in 2012, because they were in the statewide minority. The fact that the Electoral College negates them does not mean the solution is to render them the majority by making their votes count more than Democrat urban people’s votes. That would make the Electoral College even more anti-democratic.

The racial implications of this proposal are clear because Virginia’s black population (20% of the total population) is concentrated in urban areas, and they heavily favored Democrats.

3. Ann Coulter’s Demographic Problem

Ann Coulter suggested on Sean Hannity’s program in January that a high gun homicide rate for black people is not a problem. “If you compare white populations, we have the same murder rate as Belgium,” Coulter said. “So perhaps it’s not a gun problem, it’s a demographic problem.”

People, no matter what color or ethnicity, getting killed with guns at the rate the US experiences is a gun problem. It would be accurate to say, though, that our problem with gun violence has demographic dimensions.

Ann Coulter seems to think that real racism is over. Based on her comments, judge for yourself.

4. Imagining Martin Luther King Jr. as a Gun Rights Advocate

In January, Gun Appreciation Day chair Larry Ward said on CNN, “I think Martin Luther King, Jr. would agree with me if he were alive today that if African Americans had been given the right to keep and bear arms from day one of the country’s founding, perhaps slavery might not have been a chapter in our history.”

This is historical revisionism that goes haywire on so many levels. MLK jr.’s main message was non-violence. To see a more in-depth evaluation, watch Al Sharpton take Larry Ward apart here.

Perhaps Larry Ward got Martin Luther King Jr. mixed up with the Black Panthers?

5. Sarah Palin Unapologetically Using Racially-Charged Expression

On her Facebook page, Sarah Palin posted the following statement a couple weeks before the 2012 election:
“Why the lies? Why the cover up? Why the dissembling about the cause of the murder of our ambassador on the anniversary of the worst terrorist attacks on American soil? We deserve answers to this. President Obama’s shuck and jive shtick with these Benghazi lies must end.”

“Shuck and jive” originally was a reference to the actions of American slaves when they “sang and shouted gleefully during corn-shucking season, and this behavior, along with lying and teasing, became a part of the protective and evasive behavior normally adopted towards white people.” (Dictionary of American Slang)

Palin went into defensive posture and called Chris Matthews and Andrew Cuomo out for previously using the term, and then she meandered into a discussion of how she talks to her one-eighth Native Alaskan children. (Andrew Cuomo used the term in 2008 toward Obama, and he had the good sense to later apologize for his choice of words. Chris Matthews used it in describing Rachel Maddow’s journalistic work as he was interviewing Maddow.)

Given its historical context, it’s a term that should be used with caution, and it’s not advisable for white people to use it in reference to the actions of black people (or probably anybody else). It’s like a man attributing a female leader’s actions to PMS. It’s just bad form.

So, that’s my round-up, and I didn’t even get started on the idea of Democrats offering so-called “gifts” to minorities.

I ran across a doozy statistic yesterday on a FB page for “1 Million Moms and Women for the Second Amendment.” I guess the group is a response to the One Million Moms For Gun Control.

Anyway, one of the statistics they quoted in a picture was, “550 rapes and 1100 murders are prevented every DAY, just by showing a gun. -Bureau of Justice Statistics, National Crime Victims survey.” Here is the link.

First, that statistic seems out of whack. Consider that if you multiply 1,100 prevented murders per day by 365, you end up with over 400,000 prevented murders for the year. Now, I suppose some people might save their lives multiple times a year with a gun, so it wouldn’t necessarily represent 400,000 total lives. (I have no idea what a person would be doing to have to save their life multiple times a year with a gun, but unless they’re an officer of the law, being law-abiding is probably not one of them.)

Second, that statistic doesn’t look like something put out by the Justice Department. Turns out, it’s not. After doing a little digging online and contacting the BJS, I found that the source of that statistic is mostly likely Gary Kleck, a criminologist from Florida State University.

Here is part of the response I got from the BJS (in less than 24 hours):

“The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) does not collect data on the number of crimes “prevented” by armed citizens. The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collects limited information on self-protective measures using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS).  We have information on whether a victim used a weapon in self-defense during a criminal incident. These data are in tables 70 and 71 of the Criminal victimization tables: http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/cvus0804.pdf”

And as for Kleck’s research:

“There is considerable disagreement over estimates of the defensive uses of guns. For example, the widely cited statistic from a 1995 study conducted by Prof. Gary Kleck states a figure of 2.5 million self-defense incidents with a gun a year.

However, other studies raise a number of questions about the validity and reliability of these estimates:

https://www.ncjrs.gov/pdffiles/165476.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1730063/pdf/v010p00096.pdf

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1730664/pdf/v006p00263.pdf

”

So, there you have it. I find it interesting that gun rights advocates are often distrustful of government, but don’t seem to mind using government sources (even mistakenly) if it fits their bill. And for my part, I don’t like to see government statistics misrepresented.

I took a quick look through Senator Feinstein’s proposed assault weapons ban, and what struck me first was the number of pages of guns which are exempt.

To put it in perspective, there were 7 pages of banned guns, and 96 pages of exempt guns. Not only would the guns that people already own be grandfathered in, they would still have several options if they want to add to their collection.

Remington Model 597: Exempt, and there are 5 retailers within 10 miles of my house.

Nuns: Agents of God or the Government? (Photo credit: Don Emmert, Getty Images. 12/14/2012)

Conspiracy theories about the Newtown shooting have inevitably cropped up lately. Some purportedly have evidence that the government staged a fake attack. Anderson Cooper, at the risk of giving them undo attention, used airtime last week to smack down one of the conspiracy theorists.

I’ll take the same risk here. I think the theories have roots in the gun rights advocates’ disappointment over the sudden turn in the gun debate. If the charges were focused on the actions of Adam Lanza, I would kind of understand them, because he isn’t well understood, and we may never have satisfactory answers about his motives.

The conspiracy theories, however, go so far as to say that the families of the dead, and the rest of Newtown’s people, are lying about their children being murdered. Some people are questioning if there were really bodies at the funerals because the caskets were closed.

Aside from how appalling these theories must be for the families who have already experienced such indescribable losses, let’s think about this for a minute. Do these conspiracy theorists want to see pictures from the coroner’s reports as proof that actual children died? Would that be enough? I’m pretty sure if those images were ever leaked, the people promoting the theories would call them fake, but at the same time more Americans, once they finished wretching, would line up behind stricter gun control. It would be even more detrimental for the gun rights agenda.

As if that weren’t a big enough potential backfire for the theories, let’s address the charge that the nuns photographed outside Sandy Hook Elementary at the time of the shooting were really government agents wearing “tactical” sneakers. The vast majority of nuns are at least in their seventies, and it shouldn’t be surprising that they choose to wear comfortable shoes. Yes, these ID badge-wearing agents of God are on their feet working with the public beyond usual retirement age. Shocking, isn’t it? This is the point at which the theories reached self-parody, and I burst out laughing in spite of how awful all of this is.